Jason Morningstar posted his judging criteria for The Undead Software Engineers in Alaska Challenge.
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I'll be writing a very short (2-page) minigame called Deadline for Jason Morningstar's most twisted and excellent The Undead Software Engineers in Alaska Challenge. I need a clever LJ icon for it though I'll probably write this thing in the space of a couple hours. ;)

My concept:You are part of a software development team, trying to finish an ( Read more... )

Okay, so I submitted Hellball to the Iron MACE Game Chef last Thursday. I was supposed to drive down to MACE with drivingblind on Friday afternoon but my stupid cat decided to go on an adventure and I spent ten hours looking for him. He came back on his own at about 6 AM, thank god. In any case, I didn't get to go to MACE. Grumble ( Read more... )

Here's how my first draft turned out after about 6 hours of writing.

Hellball (PDF)
Character sheet (PDF)

Here's a little insight on how I design a game. What follows is, more or less, me brainstorming and designing aloud. If it seems to skip around incoherently at times, it's because I thinking as fast as I can write. At points, I discard ideas as quickly as I invent them.

I start with a concept. In this case, I had the constraint of "focus on ( Read more... )

Some thoughts about the reward system for my Iron MACE Game Chef entry, Hellball. Recall that in Hellball, you play a pro football player who's been "recruited" by The Devil to play a ball game of few rules and much violence in Hell, where the stakes are the soul of a loved-one. Most of the screen time is on the athletes in their normal life back ( Read more... )

I've done some brainstorming and I chose my ingredients, at least tentatively. I'm definitely going with the "athletic focus" option. I'll probably take the "resolution with only one kind of die" option, since that's pretty easy and I can do some cool stuff with it. I'm using the "no character death" option, too.

My game is Hellball. You're a pro ( Read more... )

Since I'm attending MACE and I have been enjoying the game design contests lately, I entered the Iron MACE Game Chef contest. I was nervous as this is my first "Iron Game Chef" (IGC)-style contest. The IGC style is sorta like the Iron Chef tv show. When the contest starts, they give you lists of "ingredients" to build a game around and you have two ( Read more... )

Paul Czege (author of one of my favorite games, My Life with Master), did some manually tallying of the reviews that were posted. My game, Architects of Aztlan, looks like it's in the finals (top six overall). In fact, it looks to be tied with drivingblind's game Chimaera (based on my sheet!) for 2nd place overall (25/30 points)! Aztlan also tied Something Is ( Read more... )

I got one vote in the Most Exciting category for the character sheet I created for the Reversed Engineer contest. This is for the sheet, not the game. I didn't expect to get any votes in any of those categories, so this is cool to me!